Brian Garfield - Hopscotch

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.”