Hopscotch

by Brian Garfield

  A trio of haggard musicians played sedate cocktail music on a small bandstand bathed in whorehouse-red illumination. Businessmen sat at tables by twos and threes and there was a discreet sprinkling of high-class B-girl doxies but there was no bar as such. The dimension of the half-drawn curtains on either side of the orchestra indicated that the stage could be opened out for floor shows. Three sides of the room were paneled in pane glass for floor shows. Three sides of the room were paneled in pane glass with a southward view of the city’s lamplit mountainsides. Beyond the doors on the fourth wall would be the bar, the kitchen, the managerial offices and a few smaller rooms for banquets and proms and lead-outs. Southerners were early diners and it was only nine o’clock but few of the patrons were eating; it was a place for convivial drinking more than dining out. And for a few people, the insiders who ran the faster tracks, it was something else entirely: a place where if you knew the right names and had the right amount of money you could buy anything at all.

  The tables at the windows had been claimed and that was fine; he took a table close to the door marked Private and when the miniskirted waitress came he ordered bourbon in a hoarse prairie twang. “The best you got, honey.” He gave the girl a wink.

  When she brought the drink he touched his lips to it and said, “Now that’s sippin’ whisky. Honey I wonder if you’d do me the kindness to ask Mr. Maddox to drop by my table here? Just tell him it’s old Jim Murdison, he’ll most likely remember me.”

  “I’m not sure whether Mr. Maddox is in tonight, sir. I didn’t see him come in. But I’ll check for you.”

  “Thank you kindly.”

  She had other tables to serve and it was five minutes before he saw her slip through the Private door. He glimpsed a blonde girl behind a desk inside; then the door slid shut on a silent pneumatic closer.

  After a while the waitress came out. “I’m sorry sir, Mr. Maddox hasn’t come in yet.”

  “He likely to be in later on tonight?”

  “I’m sure I couldn’t tell you, sir. I’m terribly sorry.” She gave a synthetic smile and glided away, hips oscillating.

  But she’d been in the outer office too long; they’d had a little discussion and Mr. Maddox had decided he’d never heard of old Jim Murdison and maybe he’d had a peek out through a Judas-hole and hadn’t been impressed by the look of Kendig. So Kendig had to force the impasse. There might be other ways to obtain what he wanted—even legitimate ways—but it was best to deal with an underworld type like Maddox because he wouldn’t have any ties with the Bureau or with Cutter and because the Maddoxes were in it for profit, they were businessmen, you knew just where you stood with them: they weren’t going to slit your throat or ask the wrong questions. With an ordinary good-citizen amateur running a legit charter business you wouldn’t have that assurance.

  A little while later the waitress went into the kitchen and that was when Kendig stood up and walked to the Private door.

  The blonde girl looked up from her typing. “Yes sir? May I help you?”

  “It’s all right, I know the way.” He went straight across to the door of the private office. When the blonde made to get up he turned. “What’s your name? Are you new? You don’t know me, do you.”

  It flustered the girl; she was very young, hired for her ornamental excellences, not her mind. “I—I’m very sorry, sir.”

  Kendig went in.

  Maddox looked up, burly and muscular, thighs bulging against his trousers, a ledger in his lap. He was tough enough not to look alarmed. The tentative beginnings of a polite smile: “May I help you, friend?”

  “Name of Jim Murdison, out of Topeka. Expect you don’t remember me but I was up here a few times seven, eight years back with old Jim-Bob Fredericks from Dallas?” He went booming right across the carpet and pumped Maddox’s hand.

  Maddox suddenly beamed. “Why of course I remember. Now I’m real sorry about all that confusion. You have a seat, hear—tell me what-all I can do for you?”

  Maddox didn’t remember at all of course. But Kendig knew Jim-Bob Fredericks by sight—nobody who’d ever had anything to do with international oil machinations didn’t know Fredericks—and once seven years ago he had in fact seen Fredericks in this club talking to Maddox.

  “You said if I could ever use a little help on this little thing or that I should look you up. Well sir here I am.” Kendig looked around the room with quick appreciative nods. Maddox had no desk; he worked in an easy chair by a coffee table. The middle-sized room had the grandiose pretension of an antebellum drawing room: high ceiling, brocaded furnishings, leather-laden bookshelves, a painting that might well be a real Stuart, living-room lamps that illumined without glare.

  “I’d be pleased to help out, Mr. Murdison. What can I do for you?”

  “I’d kind of like to charter a private plane.”

  Maddox gave him an outdoor squint. In another month he’d be out in the piney woods himself—he was the kind who’d like to prove his carnivorous superiority to a 140-pound whitetail buck. “I’m not exactly in the airplane binness, Mr. Murdison.”

  “Well this is for a little vacation I’ve got in mind. It wants to be a real private plane, you understand?”

  Maddox dropped a piece of notepaper in the ledger to mark his place; closed it gently and set it aside. “Well now I expect you realize a binnessman like me can’t go involving himself in extralegal activity.”

  “I’m not in the smuggling line, nothing like that. I have a little problem about these private detectives that sort of keep tabs on me, you follow? And it just might be I promised this little lady friend of mine a nice quiet vacation down there in the islands for two, three weeks?”

  Maddox slid back in the chair, clasped his hands over his belly and grinned slowly. We’re both men of the world. “From time to time I do pass on a contact or two in the right direction. How long a flight would this be that you had in mind?”

  “This little girl sort of has her heart set on Saint Thomas down there in the Virgins.”

  “That’s about eleven hundred air miles from Miami. You couldn’t exactly do that in a puddle-jumper. You’d need a Bonanza, Twin Apache, something like that.”

  “That sounds about right, yes sir.”

  “A plane that size is likely to cost you a little money. You’d want service both ways, two or three weeks apart?”

  “That would be just about exactly right, Mr. Maddox.”

  Maddox squinted at a point above and behind him. “We’d have to face the fact that private aviation fuel’s a little hard to come by.”

  “Yes sir. Between you and me I think there’s always ways to get around these little problems. If a man’s willing to spend a little money here and there. I wouldn’t be here talking to you if I didn’t intend to spend a little money. I mean what else is the stuff for?”

  Maddox smiled gently and watched him. Kendig took the flat wallet from his inside pocket and counted off ten one-hundred-dollar bills and placed them neatly on the arm of his chair. Then he put the wallet away. “I’m on my way down to Houston, a meeting tomorrow afternoon, and then I’ve got to be back in Topeka by Friday. I’d rather you didn’t get in touch with me—I’d better get in touch with you.”

  “I’ll tell you what. If you’ve got a few hours to spare right now why don’t you wait around the club a while or come back later tonight. I might be able to help out. I happen to know a charter pilot here in town who’s done a few discreet chores for me from time to time. Why don’t you check back with me in about, say, two hours?”

  Kendig stood up. “That’s mighty kind of you.” He shook hands—Maddox didn’t get up—and went to the door; and hesitated with his hand on the knob. “My name’s not Murdison of course.”

  “Didn’t think it was, Mr. Murdison.”

  “Jim-Bob likely never heard of anybody called Murdison from Topeka. If you were thinking of checking me out with him.”

  “I don’t guess that’ll be necessary now, Mr. Murdison.” Maddo
x smiled coolly and nodded and Kendig went out.

  They were shooting straight pool on a nine-foot table in a paneled room off the kitchen and he watched the play with a glass of bourbon in his hand. He wasn’t partial to bourbon but it went with the Murdison image. The two contestants were good, each trying to outhustle the other before the big money got laid down. Pool wasn’t Kendig’s game; it was too mathematical; but watching was a way to pass the time.

  By half-past eleven the two hustlers had concluded their ritual courtship dance and by general consent everyone took a break before the commencement of the big game. Kendig went back to the clubroom with the rest. Both players retired into the men’s room to spruce themselves like actresses before an opening curtain; the predictability of it amused him. He took a seat behind a lonely little table and a woman three tables away drew his attention because she was striking and because a curious defiance hung in an aura around her. One of the pocket billiard spectators was trying to join her and she wasn’t having any; she didn’t look at the man. Kendig saw the man’s lips move: Could I buy you a drink?

  I’ve got one.

  But the man stayed where he was and kept his hand on the back of the empty chair until the woman lifted her eyes slowly and fixed him with a flat stare of contempt that sent him away shaking his head.

  The waitress moved by, stopped at the woman’s table and spoke; she was indicating Kendig with a dip of her head; and the woman got up from her table and came toward him. She had a supple spider-waisted little body and short dark hair modeled to the shape of her Modigliani face.

  She let him have his look before she said, “You’ll know me again.” Her voice was cool, low in pitch—more smoky than husky. She pulled out the empty chair and sat down. He guessed she was thirty-five; she was attractively haggard. “You’re Murdison?”

  “Could be.”

  “Maddox said you want to hire a plane.”

  “Do you work for a charter outfit or are you just taking a survey?”

  “Neither. I fly my own airplane.”

  That made him readjust his thinking. She’d taken him by surprise and he rather enjoyed that. It didn’t happen to him very often.

  “I’m Carla Fleming,” she said. “It’s Mrs. Fleming.”

  “Jim Murdison.”

  They shook hands across the table—rather like pugilists before the bell, he thought. “Did Maddox fill you in?”

  “Round trip to Saint Thomas, two or three weeks between, and very private. When do you plan to go?”

  “Early October, I think. I can’t fix a date right now.”

  “If you expect me to hang around waiting my time comes pretty high, Mr. Murdison.”

  “All right,” he said. “The way we’ll do it, you’ll fuel up and draw your overseas papers at Miami International. File a flight plan to Charlotte Amalie. You fly out at not more than four thousand feet until you’re off the screen of their radar control. Then you swing down to the old landing field at Coral Key. You know it?”

  “I know where it is. I imagine it’s pretty overgrown.”

  “It’s serviceable.”

  “Then I pick up you and a lady.”

  “And fly us to Charlotte Amalie. Your flight plan will check out—you’ll be about an hour late, that’s all.”

  “And the same number coming back?”

  “That’s right, ma’am.”

  She watched him with direct amusement. “It won’t be cheap, Mr. Murdison—since I don’t know what we’ll be carrying.”

  “I’m not smuggling anything.”

  “I hear you saying it.” She was poised, neat, confident; she knew how to sit and what to do with her hands and she was sitting there working out exactly how high she could bill him before he balked at the price. “I fly a Bonanza,” she said. “Executive charters generally run fifty cents a linear mile—that’s for the plane, not per passenger. But this will run you more than that.”

  “How much more?”

  “Half again. Seventy-five cents a mile. And you’re paying for the two trips I’ll have to make empty. Two round trips, that’s about forty-four hundred miles. Thirty-three hundred dollars, Mr. Murdison.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to buy your airplane.”

  She smiled. “If you want a better price why don’t you try one of the commercial outfits down in Miami? Actually I think the airline fare to Saint Thomas is about sixty dollars.”

  “Three thousand,” he said, “in cash.”

  “That’s agreeable but I get two hundred a day for me and the plane while I’m waiting for you in Miami.”

  “All right,” he said. “Be there on October third. Where do you usually lay over?”

  “There’s a motel called the Flamingo a few blocks from the airport gate.”

  “Fine. Check in with the desk every two hours after noon on the third.”

  He dipped the fingers of his left hand into the flat wallet inside his jacket, extracted the envelope from it and put the envelope on the table. “That’s five hundred. I’ll give you another fifteen hundred when you pick us up at Coral Key and the rest when you pick us up at Charlotte Amalie for the return flight.”

  “I guess that’s fair enough. If you’re making any deals with Maddox about papers you’ll have to do that personally with him—I don’t want to know anything about it.”

  “I didn’t say anything about papers, Mrs. Fleming.”

  “So you didn’t.” She put the envelope in her handbag; snapped the clasp shut and put the bag on the floor by her feet. “Now you may buy me a drink. Scotch mist, with Dewar’s.”

  At half-past one he was in her apartment without quite being sure why. “There was a Mr. Fleming,” she said. “He’s a nice guy. One day we just decided neither one of us would be worth looking at across a breakfast table for the next thirty years.”

  But she was vulnerable; it was evident in the way the apartment looked. It was a very personal place, she’d made it hers. The furniture looked Mexican: pale wood, very heavy with thick comfortable cushions. There were a couple of wicker armchairs with Indian patterns dyed into them. She had Navajo rugs on the walls and they looked as if she’d had them for a long time; the lower edges were frayed where cats had sharpened on them. The single painting was a limited-edition Georgia O’Keeffe reproduction. She had an air race trophy on an end table and the LP jackets by the stereo were thoroughly used clues to a taste in music which was catholic but not undiscriminating: she had Toscanini but not Fiedler, Ray Charles but not Bob Dylan, Sgt. Pepper but not the Stones, MJQ but not Brubeck.

  The two cats were alley-bred grey tigers, aloof and athletic. They inspected Kendig. One chewed his finger. He let them prowl, not making a fuss over them. A little corner of his mind was pleased that there was a little flap cut into the screen at one of the windowsills so that the cats could come and go. And she didn’t baby-talk them. “They do care whether you like them or not,” she said, “but they’re too dignified to let it show.”

  When he kissed her she drew back and smiled to show she was willing but not serious.

  They were not touching but he could feel her warmth and the rhythm of her breathing. She got up from the bed, trailing her fingers along his arm, and he lay staring at the ceiling until she came back from the loo. Her dark eyes were heavy with sleep; she gave him a soft-lipped kiss and he felt a pang of weary sadness. She sat up then, hair tangled around her face; she offered him a cigarette but he shook his head, withdrawn.

  “You’re a feline sort of man. I don’t mean that unkindly.” She touched her lips to his hair and lay down against him. “I’m a feline sort of girl. But sometimes you just need somebody.”

  “Yes.”

  “Usually it’s enough to be in the air. That’s the only real freedom I know—being in motion in three dimensions.” She switched off the light. He thought of leaving but hadn’t the desire to, nor reason to. Then she said, “Two strangers rutting in bed. But it’s not as sad as it might be.”

  “No.
”

  “You just talk a blue streak sometimes, don’t you.”

  She was fast asleep when he went down to his car. In the predawn half-light the furnace reddened and charred the sky: like a landscape out of Dickens. She lived on the steep side of the hill that led up toward Vestavia. In the shadows he stole the front license plate off a Buick; the owner probably wouldn’t notice its absence for a long time and then he’d chalk it up to accident or vandalism and the likelihood of its being reported to the police was remote. He mailed a letter to Ives and threaded the streets; by breakfast time he was a hundred miles toward the Georgia line. He ate in a truckers’ café. It was when he returned to the car that he saw the glint of metal in the back seat.

  It was a woman’s compact the color of brass, mottled finish, monogrammed CJF in an engraved scroll. He opened it and saw himself in its round mirror but he couldn’t find anything particularly feline about the face. When he snapped it shut it left a little powder on his fingers. He twisted to smudge the prints and dropped it into his pocket. Impulse or calculation? He wondered which had made her leave it there. She hoped he’d bring it back to her. Well he’d see her in Miami.

  He crossed the state line and toward midday he was in the pines. Heat trembled off the blacktop. The road was narrow, badly graded for the curves, an upward lip at each side. He felt nagged by an unease he could neither place nor comprehend. It made him think about obtaining a revolver. But a gun was always to be regarded as the last of all last resorts; he had not shot, at anyone since 1944 in Italy and that had been in the lines, in uniform, shooting at helmeted Wehrmacht soldiers who were shooting back. The use of a gun was the admission of amateurism and the only thing Kendig had was his professionalism.

  He drove slowly up the rutted track. Insects talked in the heat. When he switched off he could hear the hot engine ping with contractions and distantly the roughhousing of the river. He sat in the car scrutinizing the dappled shadows—the edge of the forest, the barn, the abandoned machinery, the disheveled house. He sensed the place was empty. When he felt sure of it he walked up to the porch.