The Hemingway Thief (11 page)

“Set up?” Milch sputtered. “What?”

“Ebbie, things have gone a bit sideways,” I said. I supposed I was falling into the role of good cop to Grady's bad cop. That was fine with me. I was too exhausted to play anything else. “Thandy told us you stole the manuscript from him, and, to be honest, we're leaning toward believing him.”

“That's bullshit,” Milch said. “It happened just like I told you.”

“I don't believe you, dipshit,” Grady said, and shook Milch's chair with his foot.

“The problem, Ebbie, is that Thandy wasn't in a position where he had to lie to us,” I said. “Also, it seems you were trying to split on us even though you were supposed to be so hurt you couldn't move.”

“Wait, I—” Milch said. Digby looked up briefly from his book and marked his place with his thumb. He picked up the distributor cap, which had been next to him, and tossed it to Milch. It landed in his lap, smearing grease on his T-shirt. A murderous look came over Milch as he realized what it was. The look was there for a flash, and it may have only been a trick of the light. Just as quickly, the worried boyishness came back to his face.

“So you see, we've already caught you in one lie,” I said.

“What happened with Thandy?” Milch's voiced cracked. His eyes whipped back and forth from me to Grady.

“He tried to kill us, you little shit,” Grady said.

“Kill you,” Milch said, almost in tears now. “Oh God, I'm sorry, I never thought . . .”

“Got out by the hair on our asses,” Grady growled.

“Where's the manuscript?” Milch whimpered.

“Really, Milch?” I said, nodding at Grady. “Is that your biggest concern right now?”

“Where is it?”

“I have it,” I said. I had left it downstairs in the phone booth.

“And Thandy?”

“On the side of the road tied to a colonel,” Grady said, and he let the chair come down on its front legs with a loud bang. He pulled the orange crate from under the pile of clothes and took a seat.

Milch scratched at the bandage on his head and took a deep breath. A wide smile came over his face. The whimpering was gone, along with the tears I could have sworn had been rimming in his eyes.

“Then what's the fucking problem, guys?” he said, shaking his head with a laugh. Grady and I looked at each other with confusion.

“Are you seriously . . . ?” Grady started, but he was cut off by more of Milch's laughter.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I get it and, yeah, I kind of set you up, but you have to believe me; I wasn't a hundred percent sure Thandy would have anybody other than the first guys out here looking for me. And, I really mean this, I really didn't think the son-of-a-bitch would try to kill you.”

“Was that an apology?” I said to Grady. He looked back at me, bewildered.

“Guys, focus here,” Milch said, and stood up. He opened his hands out to us, and it reminded me of a magician showing how he had nothing up his sleeves. “We got the manuscript and Thandy is out of the picture, right? We're in the pink as far as I'm concerned.”

“‘We'?” I said.

“Of course,” Milch said. He patted me hard on the shoulder and tossed the distributor cap back to Digby. Digby let it fall from the bed to the floor without looking. He kept his eyes on my novel and turned the page.

Milch was unfazed. Indeed, if I had not been there, I would be hard-pressed to believe that we had been interrogating the man just half a minute before. He appeared to us now not only uninjured, but vigorous and high-spirited. He filled the room with his voice and stood over us like the archangel Gabriel delivering the Good News, or maybe just a carnival barker offering to guess my weight.

“We're in this together,” he said, snapping his fingers to count the beat of his words. I have to admit I was mesmerized by it. “We're bound by this thing and there's no way around it. Me, I'm bound by history. You, you're bound by providence. Yes, sir, we're in this together.”

“Together in what?” I said before I realized I was even talking.

“Hold on there, Coop,” Grady said. “I'm still not over the part where he set us up.”

“Well, you best get over it, Grady,” Milch said. He grabbed Grady by the shoulders and gave them a vigorous rub. Grady returned the gesture with a glare that almost made
me
piss my pants. Milch didn't even flinch. “If you don't, you're going to miss out on the big prize.”

“We've already got the manuscript pages,” I said. Milch's expansive smile curved into a grin like a knife slashed across his mouth.

“The manuscript?” he said. “Guys, this is about so much more than the manuscript.”

Then he told us another story.

Chapter Eleven

Grifter
was the proper term. In the parlance of the uninitiated he would be called a “con man,” but
grifter
was the nomenclature Ebbie Milch preferred. It was a family business started by his great-grandfather, Oliver, who traveled around the Southwest in a buckboard, selling a concoction of river water, cod-liver oil, and camphor dubbed “Doc Saturn's Cure-all Liniment Oil.” The tradition continued with his sons, Joseph, who peddled bogus land deals around Southern California, and Ebenezer, who branched out into the more labor-intensive field of pickpocketing and second-story work. When the Great War erupted, Ebenezer went off to fight the Hun in France, and Joseph went off to do a nickel in Folsom. Oliver died before either of his boys returned home.

When Joseph got out, he tried to go straight, and this lasted until the fifties, when the real-estate boom was too damn tasty for a clever man to resist the possibility of illicit profits. He had time to get married and have a son before he went down for a second fall and died on the inside.

Joseph's son, Ebenezer Oliver Milch II, named after his uncle, followed in his father's footsteps and kited bad checks around his father and grandfather's old territory. He enjoyed a certain amount of notoriety in the seventies when he briefly became the most wanted paper hanger in the state of California. He took a fall and, like his father, did a nickel in Folsom. He got out went back in, rinse, wash, and repeat. In the nineties, the aging bunko artist fathered a son, Ebenezer Milch III. When young Ebbie was old enough he was taught the family business, getting his start as a roper. The grifts ranged from long to short, from the Spanish Prisoner to the Pigeon Drop, from skillful and brilliant to clumsy and stupid. It was during one of these last swindles that the mark turned out to be an undercover cop. Milch the elder was shot fleeing from the police, and the son, only nineteen at the time, continued the time-honored Milch family tradition of time well spent in Folsom State Prison. He did the usual nickel.

Which is how Ebenezer Oliver Milch III came to be sitting in the kitchen of the family homestead, wondering what the hell he was going to do with his life. He had been paroled three weeks earlier. His mother had died while he was on the inside. The house had been left to him, which would have been great news if he'd had the money to turn on the electricity and the gas. He had a line on a few grifts friends were setting up, but it was looking more and more like he might have to do something drastic, like look for a straight job.

That was when Newton Thandy knocked on his back door. Newton presented himself as an old academic—shawl-collar cardigan, wooden cane, the whole business. Milch wasn't fooled. First lesson his father ever taught him was how to spot a fellow grifter. Thandy reeked of the con, maybe not a pro, but he was running some kind of scam. The only thing genuine about him was the leather on the portfolio he carried under his arm—the one with the brass nameplate with the initials
HB
. The old man offered Milch a hundred dollars for an hour of his time, cash up front. Milch stepped aside and let him into his kitchen. He was curious as to the game this guy was playing, and a hundred dollars was a hundred dollars.

The old man sat down at the cracked Formica table and pulled from the portfolio a sheaf of aged and battered typewritten pages held together by a piece of string tied in an elegant bow. He patted the top sheet with one wrinkled, blue-veined hand.

“What's that?” Milch had asked, pouring himself a glass of Johnnie Walker without offering any to his guest.

“This, Mr. Ebenezer Milch III, is a portfolio that I bought at auction,” the old man had said. “It was a blind auction. Nothing more than a trunk belonging not to a famous man, but to the acquaintance of a famous man.”

“There a lot of money in that?” Milch had said. He wasn't really interested, just being polite, letting the man work his con. So far it seemed like a variation on the fiddle game. A classic, and one of Milch's father's favorites.

“Normally no,” Thandy had said. “And in this case it's actually worth less than a hundred grand.”

“Chicken feed,” Milch had said. He liked the rope. The way the man said
a hundred grand
like most people would say
fifty bucks
. Thandy knew to make Milch ask the questions. Information offered is not as trusted as information solicited. Milch was bored, so he kept it going. It was better than searching the want ads. “So what is it?”

“It's a manuscript. Well, part of one. It's not very old, but it is rare. I've had it looked at. Authenticated by my people. People who know to keep it a secret. It's real.”

“I don't deal in books,” Milch had said. His drink was done and he dropped the plastic cup in the sink. He dug the man's patter, the stuff about secrets and authenticity, but he wanted to cut to the chase. “What's your pitch?”

“I am prepared to offer you five thousand dollars for your help,” Thandy had said.

“Help with what?”

“This manuscript is a window into an incomplete history, Mr. Milch,” the old man had said, and tossed an envelope full of hundreds onto the table. “I want you to help me complete it.”

“I ain't no historian,” Milch had said, picking up the envelope. If the bills were bogus, someone had done very good work on them.

“But you are,” Thandy had said. The old man leaned across the stained, cracked kitchen table and said in a clear, deep melody, “Tell me about your Uncle Ebenezer. Tell me about Paris, 1922.”

That was when Milch knew this was no fiddle game.

Chapter Twelve

“So you did steal the manuscript,” Grady said.

The conversation had moved from Milch's room down to the cantina. Grady was stretched out on top of the bar with a cigarette extending up from his mouth like a smoldering antennae and his hands crossed over his chest like a corpse. Milch had changed clothes, opting for a pair of jeans and a brown chambray shirt unbuttoned to the navel. He had replaced his bandage with a blue-and-green paisley bandana, which gave him the look of someone who shops the Keith Richards collection at Urban Outfitters.

“Sure. I followed Thandy after he left my house,” Milch said. He reached for the pot of Maxwell House, and Digby, who had been brewing it, slapped his hand away. Milch put up his hands defensively and took a seat on top of the broken cooler. “He was having dinner at this swanky place down the beach. Kept the manuscript with him while he ate. Easy pull. Called the hostess and asked for Thandy. Swiped the case when he went to answer the phone.”

“What about Andy and Dell?” I said from my usual spot on the stool at the end of the bar. Milch looked confused so I clarified. “The guys who beat the shit out of you? You said they were here about a gambling debt?”

“Oh, yeah, I may have told a little fibber there,” Milch said with a sheepish grin. “I never saw those guys before yesterday. Thandy must have hired them to track me down.”

“Is it wrong that I think I trust the guy who tried to kill us more than you?” I said only half joking.

“Come on,” Milch said with a mock frown. “The only way to trust a man is to trust him. You know who said that?”

“Not a clue,” I said. “And we already trusted you, and it bit us on the ass.”

“
Touché
,” Milch said, and gave another one of his winks. “But you have to understand, in my world trust is a matter of degrees. Sure, I lied. Sure, I do it for a living, but I never killed no one. And let me tell you this, those pages belonged to me before Thandy ever got his bony hands on them.”

“You're saying Thandy stole the manuscript from you first?” Grady said. Digby poured a cup of black coffee that looked like motor oil into a steel mug and passed it to Grady. Grady held it with both hands on his stomach but made no move to drink it.

“No, I'm saying I stole it, but I had my reasons,” Milch said. He got up from the cooler and ambled to the door, favoring his right leg so that his walk was like a stilted shuffle. The limp, along with his other aches and pains, seemed to come and go, summoned by his own will. He stepped outside and returned with three plump limes from the tree.

“So my uncle, my granduncle, met Hemingway in Paris after the war.” Milch smiled and juggled the limes as he spoke, keeping his eyes on us rather than the fruit. “They were track buddies, you know, but real good friends.
Confidants
is what the bridge club would call them. That's why he's in the book. More than once too. The chapter about Fitzgerald. Take a look.”

I had the portfolio and Milch's dog-eared copy of
A Moveable Feast
bookending my bottle of rum—I had given up on limes and tumblers for the moment. I thumbed through the book until I found the chapter aptly titled “Scott Fitzgerald.” I read aloud for the benefit of Grady and Digby. After a brief introduction comparing Fitzgerald's talent to the dust on a butterfly's wings, the chapter moved into the story of the first time Hemingway had met the man. I had gotten through three sentences of this before Milch stomped his foot and gave an honest to goodness “Huzzah.”