Shadow of a Thief

by Norman Green

  “Osteen? You must be joking, it’s like the man is channeling Jesus for Dummies. And that look he pastes all over his mug, come on, he looks just like a high school cheerleader on her first Ecstasy high. Osteen, gimme a freakin’ break.”

  I was running out of candidates. “So who’s left? That dipshit from California who keeps predicting that the world is gonna end any minute now?”

  That got to McClendon, who shook his head and repressed a laugh. “Dipshit is right, how stupid can you get? Picking an actual date? Like, for instance, Thanksgiving Day? And then Friday morning you’re standing there hanging on to your pecker and wondering why everyone is laughing at you. And even if God had Thanksgiving Day in mind, you know he’d have to reconsider, just to let you twist in the wind for a while. No, listen to me, Saul.” He went all serious. “I ain’t about any of that. You wanna know what I’m all about? It’s very simple. That morning on that sidewalk in Nevada, I was a wicked person. Evil. You know that. And ever since then, because of the Reverend Stillman, you know something, I might still be a miserable son of a gun but I’m trying, Saul. I’m trying. I just hope that I’m trying hard enough.”

  “I don’t get this. You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Believe it,” he said. “But anyway, Stillman’s foundation gets the money, I don’t. We’re building a hospital in Haiti. I been to see it.”

  “Okay, so if you’re an honest man now, how you gonna pay me? What’s my incentive?”

  He reached into a pocket, pulled out a bank card and flipped it across the table. “I still got a couple hundred thou in a bank in Barbados,” he said. “I been wondering what I should do with it. The access code is 1066. I took the liberty of adding your name to the account.”

  “Battle of Hastings.”

  He nodded. “Keep it simple.”

  I didn’t touch the card. “This was your seed money. This was your back door, you’d need this money to work up your next game. You always kept your seed money, it was like it was sacred. If you’re giving it up now, you really are throwing in the towel.”

  McClendon looked down. “I could still go back. It’s always easy to run downhill.”

  “The rev know about this?”

  “Stillman? He knows.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He told me to leave the money where it is. Told me the foundation would pay.”

  “So?”

  McClendon shook his head. “I’d rather do it this way.”

  “One last question. If the cops couldn’t find this guy, what makes you think I can?”

  He spreads his hands wide, palms up. “For one thing,” he said, “I assume that this is my fault. Someone killed my daughter because of something I did. Or at least that’s where the smart money ought to be. Chickens coming home to roost, and all that. So if I’m going to have someone rooting around in my past . . .”

  “You trust me?”

  McClendon looked sad, all of a sudden, less like the television preacher and more like the McClendon I remembered. “I know you, Saul. I know what you can do.”

  “Do you? I’m not that kid you remember. Been a lot of water over the dam since then.”

  “I know. I’ve . . . I been keeping track of you, Saul. Following your career.”

  “And how have you managed that?”

  “I told you, I have friends in high places.”

  “You know what, I wish I had about one tenth your gift for bullshit.”

  “You wanna know what your real problem is? You don’t, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. You’re like a good car with a bad paint job. I told you, Saul, I know you. I know what’s underneath the paint. Ninety-five percent of you is exactly the same as all the rest of us, and five percent is like nobody else on the planet. Now, I don’t know what you think you gotta do penance for, but as far as I know nobody sentenced you to do time out here on the asshole side of Jabib. Yeah, okay, you pulled some messed-up shit before, but you’re still young enough, Saul, you could still have a life. You ain’t really that much worse than the rest of us. You just hit back harder than we do.”

  “You think that’s it.”

  “I know it is. Listen to me. You got time. Shit, man, I was almost fifty when I found Stillman. Little bit of help, I changed everything. You can still be whatever you want. Although, no offense, that long hair and that beard ain’t doing you no favors, you ask me. You’re way too young for that John Brown shit you got growing on your face. And that nasty T-shirt . . . You look like you just stepped out of the pages of Hobo Monthly. Wasn’t for me, that waitress wouldn’a let you through the door.”

  “I think I ate in here once . . .”

  “Yeah, sure you did.” He nudged the ATM card with a fingertip. “You see this piece a plastic? You’re right, Saul, this was my back door. This was gonna be enough to pay for my next incarnation, if I ever needed one. Well, you know what, I’m going all in. I’m playing the cards I got. I’m staying with Stillman. I don’t need a back door no more, but you do. This little card, right here? This is your next life. Find out who killed my little girl and it’s all yours. And if you can’t do it, then it can’t be done. And if that’s the way this plays out, I can accept it. If I have to stand up and answer for my daughter’s death, at least I can say, ‘Lord, I hired the right son of a bitch to go looking, you know I did.’ At least he’s gotta give me credit for that.”

  “That’s a real comfort, you know that?”

  “You know what, it should be. Anyhow, she lived in New York City. My daughter. I know you spent some time there.” McClendon, like most Americans, did not understand New York. He knew LaGuardia, he knew the theater district, maybe an overpriced restaurant or two. To him, New Yorkers were recognizably human but difficult to understand. They were suspicious, wary, hard to sneak up on, quick to strike back. Not exactly his kind of prey.

  New York City saved me once.

  McClendon sighed. “Listen to me, Saul. What do you want, more than anything else in the world? I’m gonna tell you, whether you want me to or not. Okay? You want to believe in us. All of us. You want to believe that the human race has a heart. And you’d really love it if someone came up to you and asked you to be on the team. If an ordinary guy said to you, ‘Come with us, Saul, be one of us, just come and be a regular guy like us, love us and we’ll love you back . . .’ Well, I’m asking, Saul. Actually, I think I’m begging. Help me. I know that once you’re in, you will never roll over on me. Not once you’re on the team. And I promise that I will never lie to you again. Please, Saul, do this thing for me. You do this for me and I will be in your debt until the end of time.”

  Told you he was good.

  McClendon had the briefcase in the trunk of his car. There was a wet, greasy mist rolling in off the ocean, not quite what you’d call a good honest rain but enough to get you damp. The reverend’s hair was suffering, losing its careful country and western twang and hanging limp down the sides of his face, he looked less like a preacher by the minute, more like an aging wino. He stood there behind his car, holding the briefcase awkwardly with both hands for a moment before handing it to me with the air of a man giving up his firstborn. “Please don’t think bad of me,” he said. “When you read what’s in here . . . I was weak. And afraid. And selfish.” Again I wondered if McClendon really felt any of that, or if it was just part of the show.

  I took the briefcase, thinking, I’m really committed now.

  Or should be.

  “Call me, Saul,” McClendon said. “As soon as you have any news. Or even if you don’t. Okay?

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “I mean it,” he said.

  “You must be busy,” I told him. “Writing sermons. Preaching, and all that.”

  “You could leave me a message,” McClendon said, sounding wounded. “I’ll call you back, I promise I will.”

  “I’m gonna have questions.”

  McClendon nodded sadly. “Yeah. I bet. You got e-mail? ’Cause I find it much easier to
tell the truth in writing, if you know what I mean.”

  “No e-mail,” I told him, smiling to myself, because I already knew how to get the truth out of McClendon.

  The Winnebago did not look like much from the outside. It was a vintage model, from back when they made them look like giant shoeboxes on wheels. From the outside it said, Stay away, whoever lives in here is not all there.

  Which was okay by me. It kept my secrets. Not even the most determined of searchers could find everything I had stashed in here, not without losing a finger or two. Or maybe something more. Some of it was paranoia, I admit it. There may have been times in my life when I thought I was being followed by a couple of agents from the Invisible Bureau of Investigation, but by then I was over that, mostly.

  Inside, it was more functional than it looked. I’d made a few improvements, and the thing suited me. When I drew the blinds I was generally left alone. It gave me a place to eat and sleep, and it fostered the illusion that I was safe when I was inside. I sat down and plopped the briefcase on the table in front of me and popped the latches open. Inside here, McClendon told me, I would find everything he had managed to learn about his daughter. It was sad to think that you could reduce a person’s life down to a pile of stuff small enough to fit into your basic average-sized attaché. But that’s what they do when anybody dies, it’s what they’ll do when I go, someone will dig through my camper and sort through the junk. What the hell do you suppose he was keeping this for? And into the Dumpster it will go. There are things in the Winnebago that cost me, and not just in dollars and cents, either, and it was depressing to think that one day it would all wind up in a landfill. Or somebody’s yard sale. Or maybe, given the appearance of the Winnebago, maybe they’d decide that none of it was worth the trouble of sorting through it, maybe they’d tow it to one of those big salvage yards where they squash vehicles up into big metal cubes and ship them off to be melted down and reused.

  I knew I was delaying. I really didn’t want to open the briefcase, but after some more mental moaning and groaning, I did it.

  The pile did not even fill the briefcase.

  The coroner’s report was on top, in a big brown manila envelope.

  A body that has been in the water long enough will transform from something recognizably once human into a grotesquerie that will haunt your nightmares for the rest of your life. I didn’t need anything new waking me up at night, so I left the coroner’s report and the photographs that presumably accompanied it in the envelope undisturbed. I wondered if McClendon had looked at them. I marveled, and not for the first time, at the strength of the doctors, nurses, and orderlies who have to uncouple their humanity from their reason in order to discharge their duties.

  Count me out.

  As a matter of fact, the very idea of what might be inside that envelope was enough to knock me just a bit off-center, so I got up and made myself a pot of coffee. I was only feet away from that attaché but I turned my back to it and I focused as completely as I could on what I was doing. I filled the pot to the right level, which was not as easy as it sounded. Next I poured the water out of the pot and into the machine. I was immediately doubtful, given the disparity between the markings on the machine and the ones on the pot, that I had done any of this correctly, and I had to resist the impulse to upend the coffeemaker and start all over again.

  Next the filter went into the basket, there was only one filter and one basket, thank the Lord for small favors. But after that I had to count out the correct amount of coffee grounds. It seemed all too easy to let my mind wander during that process. Was that four scoops, or five? How could you be sure? Memory is only a reconstruction, after all, a lie you tell yourself about how you wish things had gone. Pick up the filter carefully, pour the coffee back into the can. Start over again with a new filter . . .

  This is not bad, really. There was a time when I was a lot worse. By the time the machine began to gurgle, I was okay again, more or less. I had attained acceptance, for the moment, of the universe as it seemed to be, and of what had become of McClendon’s daughter. The goonas were smiling on me again and I was ready to go back and look into the open briefcase again.

  Goonas. It was a word I got from my mother, it was a term she used for the fates, the gods, the invisibles whose voices whispered in her ears. Some of the things you learn when you’re eight, you can never get rid of; they stay with you whether they make any sense or not. So you do what works. You adapt. You get by.

  I found that I could not, in good conscience, skip the coroner’s report.

  The pictures were even more horrible than I thought they would be. Someone had sliced her up pretty thoroughly. They hadn’t touched her face, though, other than taking the bottom of her left ear.

  There was another envelope, it had my name written on it in McClendon’s handwriting. I decided to save that for later.

  The police reports were next, and they said, essentially, that there was not a lot to say. The young lady in question, Melanie Wing, had been a nurse, about six months out of nursing school. She’d lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, worked outreach out of Beth Israel. Plenty of acquaintances, a few close friends, no known enemies. One boyfriend. Did not report to work on such and such a day, missing persons report filed four days later. Pulled out of the water about a week after that.

  Cause of death to be determined.

  I worked my way through the pile and I tried to look at everything. I didn’t take any notes; I’d do that later when I repeated the process. At the very bottom was a report from an outfit called Whelen and Ives, with an invoice attached. It did not surprise me that I had not been the first to whom McClendon turned for help. I got up to turn off the coffee machine and I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the door glass.

  Yikes.

  How had I managed not to see what I had allowed myself to become? What it meant, I supposed, was that my brain had turned the page when I wasn’t watching, that I was on to a new chapter whether I liked it or not. I silently promised both McClendon and myself this much: I would find out who this girl was.

  From there, who knew.

  Chapter Two

  I am not back in the game.

  Yeah, there’s a lie. The exhilaration I felt at the thought of what I would be doing in the coming days told me that I was bullshitting myself, a dumb and dangerous thing to do under any circumstances. But there is a sort of mad joy to it, a kind of freedom, a release from the prison of being yourself. Being back in the game meant that I could be someone else for a while, someone to whose character, accomplishments, abilities, and assets I held no legitimate title but which I would borrow and wear around like a better man’s clothes. The dry cleaner had given them to me in error, and now I would try them on. Inhabit someone else’s problems for a while.

  “When you play this game you get in the ring with another guy,” McClendon once told me. “He walks away afterward thinking he almost got it done, but you walk away knowing you did.”

  Oh, and the game is about the money, too, because that’s how you keep score.

  Now, of course, McClendon claimed to have reformed his character and retired, now he worked the fields of the Lord. I was not entirely sure I believed that. It seemed to be a very real possibility that McClendon had simply gotten lost in his latest role. And me? I guess I thought that soloing in the Winnebago, sleeping in Wal-Mart parking lots, keeping my mouth shut as much as I possibly could might be able to show me some truth about myself, but as I stood there looking into the Winnebago’s huge bathroom mirror, all I could see was a long-haired, bearded, smelly wild-man persona which felt as if it carried no more validity than any of the other roles I had inhabited in the past.

  Damn.

  And I really thought I’d been on to something. I thought I had taken a step, woken up a little bit. Was I that stupid, had I simply conned myself into believing that there might be a real point to what I’d been doing up on the coast? Call it the Zen of surf-casting. Right at that mo
ment it felt artificial, an exercise in self-delusion, another hard lesson in the art of improv theater.

  It was almost physically painful to think I could have been that far wrong.

  I could almost hear the goonas laughing.

  The game claimed its first victim, my Jeep.

  I’d posted a handwritten notice on the Laundromat bulletin board, Jeep for sale. The next morning an old Yankee came to call, he honked his pickup’s horn in lieu of knocking on the Winnebago’s door, and he stood there waiting. I had seen him around before, and the guy had seen me, too; in the off-season the place reverted to its small-town origins. The guy wore a beard, too, but his was not like mine, his conformed to the traditions of his race and profession. He was a lobsterman, a local. A man with roots.

  God, I envied him that.

  “Sellin’ ya truck,” the guy said. It was more of a statement than a question.

  “Yep.” I can do Yankee pretty well.

  He eyeballed the Jeep. It was parked behind the Winnebago but he made no move to inspect it any closer. The guy was probably more sure of the Jeep’s provenance than I ever was, he probably went to school with the guy I bought it from. “Why so cheap?” the guy said.

  “Two reasons,” I told him. “One, I don’t want to tow it.”

  The man’s eyebrows went high on his forehead. “No? Headin’ south? Had ya fill a peace and serenity?”

  For whatever reason, I wanted to tell him the truth, if I could. “No. I was only getting started . . . but something came up.”

  “Ayuh,” he said. “Know the feelin’. What’s t’other reason?”

  “Needs a valve job.”

  “That she does,” he said. “But that’s a nice straight six she’s got in theyah. Good engine. Worth savin’. They don’t make ’em like that no more. Treat her right and she’ll run forever.” We dickered over price for a while but the guy’s heart was not in it, he knew he was getting a deal. I wound up taking a hundred less than I initially asked. The guy had lived up to the Yankee reputation for thrift and I had gotten most of my money back, but when the deal was done and the guy drove away with the keys in his pocket; I felt suddenly unsteady, as if I had come unmoored.