Lemons Never Lie

other booth, but was no longer yelling. His hand clutching the cap was at his side and he was being elaborately sarcastic now, smiling with his lips drawn back while he talked, as though in a second he'd bite the phone in half. It would be funny, Grofield thought, while the guy was on the phone, to take his truck away and drive it up to Arkansas and sell it to Purgy. Grinning, he got into the Chevy and drove away from there.

6

Grofield sat naked on the motel room bed, reading a biography of David Garrick that he'd lifted from the local library. It was after midnight, no calls had come in, and he was at the part where Dr. Samuel Johnson was describing an actor as 'a fellow who claps a lump on his back, and a lump on his leg, and cries, 'I am Richard the Third',' when the phone rang.

He hated to put the book down until he found out if Johnson had at least been put in his place, but there was no choice. Marking his place with a hotel matchbook, Grofield put the book aside, reached over to the phone, and said, 'Hello?'

The voice was male, small, nasal, and guarded. 'Is this somebody named Alan Grofield?'

'That's exactly the somebody this is,' Grofield said.

'Huh?'

'I am,' Grofield translated.

'You're looking for my friend Harry Brock.'

'In a way,' Grofield said.

'You sore at him?'

'No.'

'You sure?'

Grofield said, 'I'm sore at a guy named Andrew Myers. I think Harry Brock could tell me where he is.'

'Sure he could,' the voice said. 'He's with him right now. I just met that Myers a couple days ago. He's a madman.'

'That he is. Where'd you meet him?'

'In Vegas.'

'Oh, really?'

'But they're gone from there now,' the voice said. Grofield had a tendency to visualize people from their voices; in his mind, this one looked like a talking rat.

Grofield said, 'Where'd they go, do you know?'

'Sure I know. But I'm not sure I want to go into it on the phone.'

'Where are you calling from?'

'San Francisco.'

'Then I don't think I could drop over for you to tell me in person,' Grofield said.

'I don't personally have anything against Myers,' the voice said. 'Other than the fact that he's crazy, which is everybody's privilege, the way I see it. I wouldn't want to queer his operation.'

'He's got a thing going, has he?'

'He wanted me in. It was a little too wild for me.'

'Where was this?'

'Like I say, I don't want to queer things. There's him; there's the people he's got in with him.'

'I'll wait till he's finished,' Grofield said. 'That's a promise.' He was thinking, if Myers has something set up, it would be better to wait till after he pulled it anyway, and hit him when he was flush. Revenge was going to be sweet, of course, but beside that he was going to want his money back. He had a theater to open.

The rat-voice hesitated, saying, 'Well, I don't know.

'I don't know who passed the word on to you,' Grofield said, 'about me looking for Brock and Myers. But they must have said something about me.'

'Yeah, they did.'

'Whether I could be counted on or not.'

'Yeah, they mentioned something about that.'

'So I've told you it's not Brock I'm sore at, and I won't do anything until after they're finished doing what they're doing.' The circumlocutions were a pain in the ass sometimes, but with bugging rivaling solitaire as the nation's favorite indoor one-man sport it was necessary never to be very precise about what you wanted to say.

The rat-voice said, doubtfully, 'Yeah, I suppose if I call you up, I might as well go all the way.'

'That makes sense,' Grofield agreed.

'There's this little town in upstate New York-'