Lawrence Block - Time to Murder and Create

“Aye-aye, sir.”

I kept my eyes facing toward the door but concentrated on what I could see of him at the periphery of my vision, and it wasn’t my imagination. He did keep glancing my way. It was hard to gauge his height, because he was sitting down, but he looked almost tall enough to play basketball. He had an outdoor face and modishly long sand-colored hair. I couldn’t make out his features very well — he was the length of the room away from me — but I got an impression of cool, competent toughness.

Trina drifted back with a drink I hadn’t gotten around to ordering. “Camouflage,” she said, setting it before me. “I have given him the old once-over. What did he do?”

“Nothing that I know of. Have you seen him before?”

“I don’t think so. In fact, I’m sure I haven’t, because I would remember him.”

“Why?”

“He tends to stand out in a crowd. You know who he looks like? The Marlboro man.”

“From the commercials? Didn’t they use more than one guy?”

“Sure. He looks like all of them. You know, high rawhide boots and a wide-brimmed hat and smelling of horseshit, and the tattoo on his hand. He’s not wearing boots or a hat, and he doesn’t have the tattoo, but it’s the same image. Don’t ask me if he smells of horseshit. I didn’t get close enough to tell.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.”

“What’s the story?”

“I’m not sure there is one. I think I saw him a little while ago in Polly’s.”

“Maybe he’s making the rounds.”

“Uh-huh. Same rounds I’m making.”

“So?”

I shrugged. “Probably nothing. Thanks for the surveillance work, away.”

“Do I get a badge?”

“And a decoder ring.”

“Neat,” she said.

I waited him out. He was definitely paying attention to me. I couldn’t tell whether he knew I was taking an interest in him as well. I didn’t want to look straight at him.

He could have tagged me from Polly’s. I wasn’t sure I’d seen him there, just felt I’d noticed him somewhere or other. If he’d picked me up at Polly’s, then it wasn’t hard to tie him to Beverly Ethridge; she could have set up the date in the first place in order to put a tag on me. But even if he had been at Polly’s, that didn’t prove anything; he could have picked me up earlier and tailed me there. I hadn’t been making myself hard to find. Everybody knew where I lived, and I’d spent the whole day in the neighborhood.

It was probably around nine thirty when I noticed him, maybe closer to ten. It was almost eleven when he packed it in and left. I had decided he was going to leave before I did, and I would have sat there until Billie closed the place if necessary. It didn’t take that long, and I hadn’t thought it would. The Marlboro man didn’t look like the sort who enjoyed biding his time in a Ninth Avenue gin mill, even as congenial a gin mill as Armstrong’s. He was too active and western and outdoorsy, and by eleven o’clock he had mounted his horse and ridden off into the sunset.

A few minutes after he left, Trina came over and sat down across from me. She was still on duty, so I couldn’t buy her a drink. “I have more to report,” she said. “Billie has never seen him before. He hopes he never sees him again, he says, because he does not like to serve alcoholic beverages to men with eyes like that.”

“Eyes like what?”

“He did not go into detail. You could probably ask him. What else? Oh, yes. He ordered beer. Two of them, in about as many hours. Wurzburger dark, if you care.”

“Not awfully.”

“He also said—”

“Shit.”

“Billie rarely says ‘shit.’ He says ‘fuck’ a lot, but rarely ‘shit,’ and he didn’t say it now. What’s the matter?”

But I was up from the table and on my way to the bar. Billie ambled over, polishing a glass with a towel. He said, “You move fast for a big man, stranger.”

“My mind moves slow. That customer you had—”

“The Marlboro man, Trina calls him.”

“That’s the one. I don’t suppose you got around to washing his glass yet, did you?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact I did. This is it here, as best I recall.” He held it up for my inspection. “See? Spotless.”

“Shit.”

“That’s what Jimmie says when I don’t wash them. What’s the matter?”

“Well, unless the bastard was wearing gloves, I have just done something stupid.”

“Gloves. Oh. Fingerprints?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I thought that only worked on the tube.”

“Not when they come as a gift. Like on a beer glass. Shit. If he ever comes in again, which would be too much to hope for—”

“I pick up the glass with a towel and put it some place very safe.”

“That’s the idea.”

“If you’d told me. ”

“I know. I should have thought of it.”

“All I was interested in was seeing the last of him. I don’t like people like him anywhere, and especially in bars. He made two beers last an hour apiece, and that was just fine with me. I was not about to push drinks on him. The less he drank and the sooner he left, the happier he made me.”

“Did he talk at all?”

“Just to order the beers.”

“You catch any kind of an accent?”

“Didn’t notice it at the time. Let me think.” He closed his eyes for a few seconds. “No. Standard American nondescript. I usually notice voices, and I can’t dredge up anything special about his. I can’t believe he’s from New York, but what does that prove?”

“Not too much. Trina said you didn’t like his eyes.”

“I didn’t like them at all.”

“How so?”

“The feeling they gave me. It’s hard to describe. I couldn’t even tell you what color they were, although I think they were light rather than dark. But there was something about them, they stopped at the surface.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“There was no depth to them. They could have been glass eyes, almost. Did you happen to watch Watergate?”

“Some of it. Not much.”

“One of those pricks, one of the ones with a German name—”

“They all had German names, didn’t they?”

“No, but there were two of them. Not Haldeman. The other one.”

“Ehrlichman.”

“That’s the prick. Did you happen to see him? Did you notice his eyes? No depth to them.”

“A Marlboro man with eyes like Ehrlichman.”

“This isn’t connected with Watergate or anything, is it, Matt?”

“Only in spirit.”

I went back to my table and had a cup of coffee. I’d have liked to sweeten it with bourbon, but I decided it wasn’t sensible. The Marlboro man didn’t figure to try to take me tonight. There were too many people who could place him at the scene. This was simple reconnaissance. If he was going to try anything on, it would be some other time.

That was the way it looked to me, but I wasn’t sure enough by my reasoning to walk home with too much bourbon in my bloodstream. I was probably right, but I didn’t want to risk being very wrong.

I took what I’d seen of the guy and pasted in Ehrlichman’s eyes and Billie’s general impression of him, and I tried to match up the picture with my three angels. I couldn’t make anything work. He could be some construction roughneck off one of Prager’s projects, he could be a healthy young stud Beverly Ethridge liked to have around, he could be pro talent Huysendahl had hired for the occasion. Fingerprints would have given me a make on him, but my mental reflexes had been too slow for me to take advantage of the opportunity. If I could find out who he was I could come up around him from behind, but now I had to let him make his play and meet him head on.