Hopscotch (10 page)

He had a meal in a mediocre restaurant and there was still time to kill; he walked back to the car and stored his purchases in the trunk and then he sat through the first hour of
The Outfit
in a theater redolent of stale buttered popcorn and unwashed feet. When the movie's climax began to build so that nobody was likely to leave his seat Kendig went into the men's room and made his few simple cosmetic preparations, darkening his hair with a mascara rinse and poking a few wads of cotton up into his cheeks to fatten his face. Ordinarily
he wore his hair parted on the left and combed across his forehead; now he combed it straight back without a part. Then he knotted the tie he'd bought an hour ago and would throw away after this one use; he turned his reversible sports jacket inside out to show the plaid side which clashed stridently with the necktie and then he stood at the urinal until people started coming out of the movie house; he blended into the crowd and went up the street.

He could see the building from several blocks short of it—a fifteen-story office tower and the neon sign was still there,
Topknot Club
; there wasn't much chance it had changed hands in seven years, it was too profitable a front. He went through the heavy glass doors into the lobby and the doorman gave him an incurious glance before he got into the express elevator behind an expensively dressed couple who talked excitedly, all the way to the top in accents so relentlessly thick he lost one word in four.

The elevator gave out into a wide foyer with judiciously spaced spots of colored indirect lighting. The carpet was as deep and silent as spring grass. The man at the desk was clean and well dressed but the muscles and the attitudes were there: not exactly a gorilla but not far from it in function.

Kendig waited for the Southern couple to show their membership cards and go through the door beyond the desk and then he said, “I'm from out of town. A friend brought me up here once a few years ago.”

“You can buy a one-night membership. Cost you three dollars.”

Alabama had local-option drinking laws and you
had to be a member of the club to drink here but all it did in effect was give every bar the right to skim a cover charge off every customer. Kendig paid the three dollars and the man in the dinner jacket pressed an ultraviolet stamp against the back of his hand and waved him through.

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.” Maddox 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.”