“Take it around back if you’re goin in the office.”
He drove the LTD around to the back, creeping carefully down the narrow way between the corrugated metal side of the garage and a row of cars. He parked behind the garage and got out. The wind, strong and cutting, made him wince. The heater had disarmed his face and he had to squint his eyes to keep them from tearing.
There was an automobile junkyard back here. It stretched for acres, amazing the eye. Most of the cars had been gutted of parts and now they sat on their wheel rims or axles like the victims of some awful plague who were too contagious to even be dragged to the dead-pit. Grilles with empty headlight sockets gazed at him raptly.
He walked back out front. The mechanic was installing the muffler. An open bottle of Coke was balanced on a pile of tires to his right.
He called to the mechanic: “Is Mr. Magliore in?” Talking to mechanics always made him feel like an asshole. He had gotten his first car twenty-four years ago, and talking to mechanics still made him feel like a pimply teenager.
The mechanic looked over his shoulder and kept working his socket wrench. “Yeah, him and Mansey. Both in the office.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure.”
He went into the office. The walls were imitation pine, the floor muddy squares of red and white linoleum. There were two old chairs with a pile of tattered magazines between them-Outdoor Life,
“Excuse me.”
She looked up. “Yes?”
He had a crazy impulse to say:
Instead, he said: “I have an appointment with Mr. Magliore.
“You do?” She looked at him warily for a moment and then riffled through some slips on the table beside the adding machine. She pulled one out. “Your name is Dawes? Barton Dawes?”
“That’s right.”
“Go right in.” She stretched her lips at him and began to peck at the adding machine again.
He was very nervous. Surely they knew he had conned them. They were running some kind of midnight auto sales here, that much had been obvious from the way Mansey had spoken to him yesterday. And they knew he knew. Maybe it would be better to go right out the door, drive like hell to Monohan’s office, and maybe catch him before he left for Alaska or Timbuktu or wherever he would be leaving for.
Finally, Freddy said. The man shows some sense.
He walked over to the door in spite of Freddy, opened it, and stepped into the inner office. There were two men. The one behind the desk was fat and wearing heavy glasses. The other was razor thin and dressed in a salmon-pink sports coat that made him think of Vinnie. He was bending over the desk. They were looking at a J.C. Whitney catalogue.
They looked up at him. Magliore smiled from behind his desk. The glasses made his eyes appear faded and enormous, like the yolks of poached eggs.
“Mr. Dawes?”
“That’s right.”
“Glad you could drop by. Want to shut the door?”
“Okay.”
He shut it. When he turned back, Magliore was no longer smiling. Neither was Mansey. They were just looking at him, and the room temperature seemed to have gone down twenty degrees.
“Okay,” Magliore said. “What is this shit?”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“I talk for free. But not to shitbirds like you. You call up Pete and give him a line of crap about two Eldorados.” He pronounced it “Eldoraydos.” “You talk to me, mister. You tell me what your act is.”
Standing by the door, he said: “I heard maybe you sold things.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Cars. I sell cars.”
“No,” he said. “Other stuff. Stuff like…” He looked around at the fakepine-paneled walls. God knew how many agencies were bugging this place. “Just stuff,” he finished, and the words came out on crutches.
“You mean stuff like dope and whores ('hoors') and off-track betting? Or did you want to buy a hitter to knock off your wife or your boss?” Magliore saw him wince and laughed harshly. “That’s not too bad, mister, not bad at all for a shitbird. That’s the big 'What if this place is bugged' act, right? That’s number one at the police academy, am I right?”
“Look, I’m not a-”
“Shut up,” Mansey said. He was holding the J.C. Whitney catalogue in his hands. His fingernails were manicured. He had never seen manicured nails exactly like that except on TV commercials where the announcer had to hold a bottle of aspirin or something. “If Sal wants you to talk, he’ll tell you to talk.”
He blinked and shut his mouth. This was like a bad dream.
“You guys get dumber every day,” Magliore said. “That’s all right. I like to deal with dummies. I’m
He heard himself say: “I’m not a shitbird.”
An expression of exaggerated surprise spread across Magliore’s face. He turned to Mansey. “Did you hear that? He said he wasn’t a shitbird.”
“Yeah, I heard that,” Mansey said.
“Does he look like a shitbird to you?”
“Yeah, he does,” Mansey said.
“Even talks like a shitbird, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
“So if you’re not a shitbird,” Magliore said, turning back to him, “what are you?”
“I’m-” he began, not sure of just what to say. What was he? Fred, where are you when I need you?
“Come on, come on,” Magliore said. “State Police? City? IRS? FBI? He look like prime Effa Bee Eye to you, Pete?”
“Yeah,” Pete said.
“Not even the city police would send out a shitbird like you, mister. You must be Effa Bee Eye or a private detective. Which is it?”
He began to feel angry.
“Throw him out, Pete,” Magliore said, losing interest. Mansey started forward, still holding the J.C. Whitney catalogue.
“You stupid dork!” He suddenly yelled at Magliore. “You probably see policemen under your bed, you’re so stupid!You probably think they’re home screwing your wife when you’re here!”
Magliore looked at him, magnified eyes widening. Mansey froze, a look of unbelief on his face.
“Dork?” Magliore said, turning the word over in his mouth the way a carpenter will turn a tool he doesn’t know over in his hands. “Did he call me a dork?”
He was stunned by what he had said.
“I’ll take him around back,” Mansey said, starting forward again.
“Hold it,” Magliore breathed. He looked at him with honest curiosity. “Did you call me a dork?”
“I’m not a cop,” he said. “I’m not a crook, either. I’m just a guy that heard you sold stuff to people who had the money to buy it. Well, I’ve got the money. I didn’t know you had to say the secret word or have a Captain Midnight decoder ring or all that silly shit. Yes, I called you a dork. I’m sorry I did if it will stop this man from beating me up. I’m…” He wet his lips and could think of no way to continue. Magliore and Mansey were looking at him with fascination, as if he had just turned into a Greek marble statue before their very eyes.
“Dork,” Magliore breathed. “Frisk this guy, Pete.
Pete’s hands slapped his shoulders and he turned around.
“Put your hands on the wall,” Mansey said, his mouth beside his ear. He smelled like Listerine. “Feet out behind you. Just like on the cop shows.”
“I don’t watch the cop shows,” he said, but he knew what Mansey meant, and he put himself in the frisk position. Mansey ran his hands up his legs, patted his crotch with all the impersonality of a doctor, slipped a hand into his belt, ran his hands up his sides, slipped a finger under his collar.
“Clean,” Mansey said.
“Turn around, you,” Magliore said.
He turned around. Magliore was still regarding him with fascination.
“Come here.”
He walked over.
Magliore tapped the glass top of his desk. Under the glass there were several snapshots: A dark woman who was grinning into the camera with sunglasses pushed back on top of her wiry hair; olive-skinned kids splashing in a pool; Magliore himself walking along the beach in a black bathing suit, looking like King Farouk, a large collie at his heel.
“Dump out,” he said.
“Huh?”
“Everything in your pockets. Dump it out.”
He thought of protesting, then thought of Mansey, who was hovering just behind his left shoulder. He dumped out.
From his topcoat pockets, the stubs of the tickets from the last movie he and Mary had gone to. Something with a lot of singing in it, he couldn’t remember the name.
He took the his topcoat. From his suit coat, a Zippo lighter with his initials-BGD-engraved on it. A package of flints. A single Phillies Cheroot. A tin of Phillips milk of magnesia tablets. A receipt from A amp;S Tires, the place that had put on his snow tires. Mansey looked at it and said with some satisfaction: “Christ you got burned.”
