Pay Here

by Charles Kelly

  When I’d first reached Phoenix 24 years before, the roaring change was already underway and the predators were saddled up. In those days, the grifters came in with the wind. Land fraud was huge and the hustlers used the lure of the frontier to move empty lots in raw subdivisions. This was the grift with a western flavor, land-spinning operations called the Far West Bonanza Company, Montezuma Park, Flowing Springs. The names made the swift men sound like leathery wranglers in worn jeans, instead of burglars in gabardine suits.

  Most of those men were dead now—banged out by Chicago gunmen in underground garages, felled by heart attacks brought on by fast living and high-fat food, victims of maladies that prison medicine couldn’t or wouldn’t fix. But men like Arthur Morrison remained to carry on the tradition as best they could, doing in the innocent populace for the sake of the ready—trading paper, moving humans, keeping one step ahead of the law. I don’t know if Morrison had a sense of history, but he didn’t need to. I was there to supply it for him, and to trace his personal story to see how it fit into the background of desert flummery, fast dealing and the con. I found him on the second floor, up a paint-flaked set of ornamental metal stairs, in an office off a breezeway half-exposed to the sun. The bland lettering on the door read “Arthur Morrison and Co. Investments.” I suppose the “and Co.” was the lint in his pocket.

  “Up to the usual villainy, Arthur?” I said, having slipped through his secretary-less reception area and jammed through his inner-office door. He was on the phone, but he slammed it home.

  “What are you doin’ here?”

  “Kicking your desk to see what it’s made of, for one thing,” I said. A panel cracked and buckled, sending splinters across the floor. “That’s not mahogany, now,” I said. “Some kind of plywood, I’d guess. You ought to fire whoever puts this crap in front of you.”

  He’d scooted backwards in his office chair, but now he returned to his post warily, using his feet to walk his rolling chair back into position. He clicked his false teeth dismally. “I ought to call your boss.”

  “You ought to call Satan and all his angels,” I said, skirting his desk. “You ought to ask them to throw me into unending hellfire for what I’ve got planned for you.”

  His head rotated left to right, in an unconscious ‘no,’ and his hands came up. I think he wanted to pull off his tortoise-shell reading glasses and wipe his eyes, but he was afraid I might consider that an aggressive move. He dropped his hands back into his lap and rocked back and forth. In this heat, he was wearing a brown wool-polyester suit, and I could smell the sweat curdling under the cloth. His tie was arty yellow-and-blue, with a pattern like splashed vomit.

  “You look like shit,” I said. “But I could make you look worse.”

  “You need to leave me alone, now.”

  “Is that legal advice? Doubtless, no. The state of Georgia has bungholed your license, so it must be practical advice. What kind of trouble am I in?”

  “I just mean . . . your accident.”

  “Ah, yes, my accident.” I went to the straight-backed chair in front of his desk, sat down, propped my jaw on clenched fists. “You know, an `accident’ doesn’t signal continuing trouble. Only an attack does that.” I watched him swallow. “And the pile-up made the news, but not my role in it. So who told you?”

  He had found something to occupy his hands—a Cross fountain pen—and was jiggling it about like rock musician punctuating a drum solo.

  “Just . . . someone,” he said. “The word was circulatin’ over at Rhea’s club.”

  My tongue tick-tocked. “Arthur,” I said. “You disappoint me. You have no sand. I covered the state’s big grifters. Nate Waxman. Billy Parnassus, who took the Phoenix National Bank for $5 million. Even Dudley Bucholz, remember him? He convinced Scottsdale officials they didn’t own the land that held City Hall, and sold it back to them. Those were confidence workers with guts. You have none. But do you know the biggest difference between those men and you?”

  He shook his head dumbly.

  “Why, they lived a good long time. In fact, I think Parnassus is still alive, thriving in the Bahamas.”

  His voice was a squeak. “I’m still alive.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Forty-four.”

  “Just my point. Arnie Sweeney was forty-two. I think you had better get your affairs in order.”

  His tongue flapped saliva onto his full lips.

  “I cannot believe you are threatenin’ me.”

  “No, of course you can’t. Your head’s always been thicker than your ass.” I jerked my hand up just to make him flinch. “Actually, you’re threatening yourself, with all your fuck-ups. This auto smash. Your move on Daly Marcus. You’ve left me no options.”

  From outside the window, I could hear the clank and whir of construction machinery working the barren land, gobbling saguaros and paloverdes and yucca plants. Morrison hearkened to the sound, too, and noise of destruction seemed to embolden him.

  “You wouldn’t be pushin’ me if Rhea was here.”

  “She’s worth the lot of you,” I said. “But she’s not here.”

  “No.”

  “Still, there’s a whiff of her.”

  His face was suddenly quiet as a whisper. I leaned forward.

  “It strikes me as quite odd that you and Bracknall and the rest of this filthy crew have picked right up where she left off. Without her kicking your backsides, you tend to drift and fester and rot. But you’ve polished off Sweeney and you’ve nearly gotten me. Perhaps you killed Rhea. Daly Marcus thinks so. I don’t know about that. But Rhea must have left you a battle plan.”

  “There’s no battle plan.”

  “No scheme, no playbook, no marching orders?”

  He straightened his tie. Now he wasn’t afraid to move his hands. “No.”

  “You know that Rhea and I were very close.”

  Now he breathed more easily, and his teeth peeked out.

  “She got you goin,’ you mean.”

  “She got me coming and going, as they say.”

  He thought I was making a concession to him, and he rolled his shoulders inside his horrid brown suit coat.

  “She sucked you in.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  Now he was really happy, the bastard.

  “You can’t do anythin’ because she made you part of the operation,” Morrison said. “You have legal liability. If you wrote anything, you’d be putting yourself right in there amongst us.”

  I grinned at him, just the way I had at Rory Gallagher before he’d plastered himself all over a Belfast hide-hole.

  “I don’t have to write anything, Arthur,” I said. “I simply have to put you in a position. It’s the business of a journalist to make people believe things. I’m an expert. I’ve spoken to you, and I’ve spoken to Daly Marcus. Bracknall knows that, or he will soon. There are so many things you might have told us. Do you think it’s possible I could tell him a story that would get you killed?”

  He tried to speak twice before he managed it. “What story?”

  “Why, any story at all. Let’s try one and see if it sings. You’ve been working with me all along to get an easy ride when I write about Rhea’s smuggling operation. You put me on the scent of the chopped-up migrants. You raised suspicions in Daly’s mind about Rhea’s death. You did that so Daly would work with me. And just this morning you called me here. To warn me about further attempts on my life.”

  Morrison sat and nibbled his lip, letting this percolate. Then, unexpectedly, he burped a laugh. His eyeglasses ratcheted up and down and his teeth clicked and his chair squeaked and he clapped his hands. He wiped his eyes, then forced one more giggle, like a car engine triggering after you’ve shut off the ignition.

  “You’re about two bricks shy of a load,” he said. “You really will say anything,
won’t you?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “No-one will believe that.”

  “They don’t have to believe it all. Just a tiny portion will do. After all, how large was Arnie Sweeney’s misstep? He simply made a phone call. Like you, he was supposed to move Daly Marcus in a certain direction. He failed, and now look at him. Someone in your organization has stopped making allowances.” I raised an eyebrow. “Tell me, is your necktie feeling tighter?”

  He was keeping his hands in his lap, but it was requiring an effort. All the laughter was out of him now, even the bogus kind.

  “You’re a liar.”

  A curious insult, coming from a con man.

  “I’m a journalist. That’s better than a liar. Who else can whisper through every keyhole in this Valley of a morning?”

  Can a sociopath be shocked? Poor Arthur.

  “You don’t care at all,” he said. “Nothing matters to you. You’d get me killed and make it all into a paragraph.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you hate me so much?”

  “I don’t hate you at all. You are just someone I need.”

  “You hate Rhea.”

  Where had that come from?

  “I can’t hate her any more. She is no longer here to hate.”

  “Still—”

  “All I want to do,” I said, “is to get a news story and stay alive.” I clenched a fist in my lap, but kept it low so Morrison couldn’t see it. “Don’t try to redirect me. I’m not the type of man who is easily redirected.”

  “I know that. So did Rhea.”

  I made myself reply. “What do you mean?”

  “She said she had to get you where you were weakest, but she couldn’t find any weak points. At first.”

  “And then?”

  “And then she discovered you were starved for excitement.”

  Oh, she had been right about that. It went back to seeing myself wrapped around that drainpipe, watching myself die. Ever since, I’d been on the outside, regarding my own life and that of others. When I met Rhea I wanted to be inside myself, even if I had to feel pain and cold, even if I had to risk hell. That’s why I went with Rhea. I wanted to stake my soul, to be sure I had one. Many journalists live very well without souls, but I didn’t want to live that way any more.

  “Excitement, is it?” I said to Arthur Morrison. “Well, I’m glutted with it now, because I’m playing with your life and mine. And I’m at the top of my game. I hope you can keep up, because you are going to play along with me.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Handsome Dan, as usual, was good as his word. Within an hour of Daly’s approach, he and she were saddled up in a Ford four-wheel-drive emblazoned with the insignia of the Pinal County Sheriff, rattling down Arizona 287 on a route that would run them into Arizona 387 and take them eventually to the Hotel Escalera Grande.

  “Rhea got involved with the place a year ago,” he said, as the Ford’s oversized air-conditioner battered the white blast of heat. “I guess she owned it. She took it over, anyway. Callan said she was trying to fix it up and get it going again, and she did some work. I used to see construction trucks out there. But I guess it got to be too expensive.”

  “Is it old?”

  “For this place, it’s old. A guy put it up back around 1900. Emil Jasic. A businessman, Swiss or German or something. He made a bundle in cosmetics, then spent the rest of his life running around the world, building hotels in places that were damn hard to get to—the Himalayas, Africa, Amazon rain forests. The idea was it was an adventure just to get there. Backpacking, going on safari, taking a boat up a jungle river. When you arrived, you got fresh linen, crystal to eat off, great food.”

  Daly was unsettled by the artillery within reach—a Remington 870 shotgun power-locked in a carrier between her and the driver’s seat, its polished wooden butt almost nudging her left knee—but she was sliding easily into Robles’ personality. For a lawman, he wasn’t gruff or anything. In fact, he seemed to be helpful and nice. Daly had never gone with a police person, she’d always thought they would be mean, but maybe she’d missed something.

  “You sure know a lot about this,” she said.

  Robles checked the rearview. A rattletrap pickup was coming up fast.

  “Callan told me,” he said.

  The pickup winged by, two laughing Pima kids in the cab, another two in the back, one wearing a Dallas Cowboys pullover. They waved, and Robles waved back. He even smiled.

  “So you know Callan pretty well.”

  “Not many reporters come out this way,” he said.

  They swung up from Arizona 387 onto Interstate 10 and headed south. The Sacaton Mountains wavered mirage-like under a glassy sky. The wind puffed dust—topsoil and fine sand, the leavings of formations that had poked up millions of years before from the floor of an ancient sea. Granite, basalt, rhyolite, gneiss, schist. Amid the desolation, saguaros lifted distorted arms, and to Daly the area seemed increasingly familiar. She remembered the shuttle trip after she’d heard of Rhea’s death and how she’d ridden south through just such a landscape. Maybe the whole country looked like this, but you had to admit this was eerie. Then, a couple of miles further on, just as Robles steered for the exit and they swung through a long cement curve, Daly scanned the near distance, shivered and said, “The graveyard.”

  Robles looked over with a practiced eye. The old-fashioned white crosses, the humps of earth where the gravediggers hadn’t bothered to do a clean job, the ragged footpaths. Unfenced, open to the sky, a lonely place. Prickly pear, cholla, Mohave thorn, which some called Crucifixion thorn, and somewhere underneath all this, six feet down, the earthly remains of Rhea Montero.

  “Casa de los Muertos,” he agreed. “Two more miles and we’re there.”

  * * * *

  “Don’t know what you hope to gain by this,” Morrison said, as we slant-parked in front of Eight Ball Billiards near 18th Street and McDowell Road. The parlor was built of tan slump block, all Space Age angles and curves, circa 1950. Smeary bulletins covered the front window. Tournaments, game specials, cue-rental rates. The building had been a cafeteria once, advertising salisbury steak, meat loaf and fried chicken.

  “Perhaps I’m just out for sport,” I replied. “Did you ever notice that things have a way of falling into place if you just put people in play?”

  “No.”

  “Trust the world, Arthur. It’s been here longer than you or me.”

  Inside, the air-conditioned air was like ice fractured regularly by the crack-crack of pool balls. In the back, at a corner table, I spotted Bracknall disposing of a young opponent—a salesman type in a short-sleeved shirt and cheap tie. The salesman watched hopelessly as Bracknall worked. The bar owner’s cue strokes were swift. Despite the gut-baggage he carried, Bracknall swung easily about the table, choosing up his shots without delay and smashing them home.

  We reached the table and waited silently. The game of not speaking is always lost by whoever fears looking foolish. That’s not my problem. But Bracknall, the cage fighter in the Brooks Brothers shirt, fancied himself a great, serious man. He popped the six-ball on a bank shot, but it trembled on the lip of the middle pocket and failed.

  “Here on business, Callan?”

  “Always.”

  He examined the table layout as the salesman nervously selected a shot.

  “Not looking for pussy?”

  I scanned the place. Eleven men. An attendant and ten players.

  “You’ve such an interesting mind. Why would you think that?”

  “Since Rhea went under, you must be short. Unless you’ve been screwing that hippie chick.”

  “You and Arthur think alike. You obsess about Rhea. Are you having trouble moving on?”

  “Why? What’s Arthur being saying?”

  Oh. So there was the
weak point.

  “Interesting things.”

  The salesman missed. Bracknall hesitated, then took his turn.

  “You never learn,” he said. “You ought to be keeping your distance from us.” He shifted past me and within range of Morrison, who had slunk against the near wall. “You’re in the shit yourself. And Arthur—”

  Bracknall lined up his shot, then jerked his cue backwards and plunged it into Morrison’s chest. Morrison yelped with surprise and bent forward, clutching himself where the cue had struck bone. His hands searched for the injury, trembling, as he uttered bleats of pain, and I grinned at Bracknall.

  “Look at you,” I said. “All a-twitter. Is that why you tried to kill me last night?

  Bracknall wasn’t bothering with tricky angles now. He lined up on the ten-ball, a long but straight shot to the opposite corner. He only needed a clean stroke, but he was not quite there. The ball rimmed out.

  “There’s a pack of people who would like to kill you,” he said, as the salesman tried for a shot and also missed. “What makes you think I care?”

  He bent to stroke his next shot, but I snatched the cue ball. That was the unpardonable American sin—interrupting the game, whatever game. Morrison was slinking away from us. All this was too much for him.

  “You went out of your way to bleed me out to Daly Marcus,” I told Bracknall.