Snitch World (16 page)

“I like the shoes,” Marci abruptly said.

Klinger demurred. “They won’t take much of this weather,” he moved his head at the raindrops teeming down the window, “but they fit. What I like is the coat,” he added. “If I ever get warm again, this coat will keep me that way.”

“Did you spend all forty bucks?”

“That plus another sixteen.”

“Receipt?” She held out her hand.

Klinger fished it out of the inside breast pocket of the peacoat and gave it to her.

She accepted it, then turned her head toward her own door’s window. A moment later she sighed, fogging the glass.

Klinger was about to say thanks, it’s been like touching the stars, open the door, and walk into the rain against traffic and never see this woman again, when she turned and said, “How’d you like to make a thousand bucks?”

The cabbie looked up from his calculator, blinked at the windshield in front of him, and went back to his figures.

“Well?” Marci asked Klinger.

Klinger narrowed his eyes. “On top of expenses?”

Marci shook her head and smiled a little smile. “But of course.”

“You have my attention,” Klinger admitted.

“Back to Goodwill,” she said. Before Klinger could object she added, speaking to the cabbie, “Wait here.”

“You wait,” the cabbie said, looking up from his calculator. “You think I’m born yesterday?” He pointed at the meter, whose LEDs now formed the figure $72.55.

“Oh,” Marci said. “Of course.” She produced her wallet and handed a hundred-dollar bill over the driver’s shoulder. “We’ll be back.”

The cabbie stretched the C-note between his two hands, held it up against the light, and nodded. “I’ll be right here.”

The crescendo of insanity inside the Goodwill had increased and Marci was picky, so the second trip took forty-five minutes.

While she shopped for him, Klinger made a beeline for the dressing room in which he’d changed. It was unoccupied, but his wet clothes were gone. So much for the bindle of speedball.

When they got back in the cab Klinger was dressed in
a dark tweed jacket with black elbow patches, a pineapple shirt, dark slacks, the same shoes, and a plaid fedora with a little feather stuck in the band. He carried his earlier purchases in a large paper shopping bag.

Marci slid across the back seat until she was directly behind the driver. “That was fun,” she told Klinger, as he followed her into the cab and out of the rain. “I haven’t dressed a man since a fly-by-night liposuction clinic paralyzed my father.”

Klinger had just settled into his seat. Hearing Marci’s quip, he started to get out again.

“Hey.” Marci laughed and put her hand on his arm. “Take it easy.”

Klinger froze. “Taking it easy,” he said to the rain, “has never gotten me anywhere.”

“Did you keep the receipt?” she asked him.

Klinger sat back into the seat and closed the door against the rain. “No, darling,” Klinger said faintly, “I think you have it.”

She looked about her person, then plucked the corner of a white slip of paper out of the wad of cash in her hand. “Here it is.” She folded the slip and tucked it into a zippered compartment of her chamois wallet, parallel to a neat sheaf of legal tender. “Service uniform.” She dropped the wallet into her briefcase/purse. “A definite write-off,” she noted contentedly.

“Speaking of which …” The cabbie touched the meter, whose LEDs now read $102.35.

“I’ll need a receipt for that, too,” Marci remarked. “When the time comes.”

The cabbie retrieved three blank receipts from under the sun visor and handed them over his shoulder. “Where to now?”

“Look,” Klinger said.

The cabbie changed his angle of sight so as to see Klinger.

“Yes?” Marci said.

“About this hole in my stomach?” Klinger placed the flat of his hand over the lower-left side of his belly. “I need to put something on it.”

Marci consulted her phone. “It’s past lunch time, it’s true.”

“I’d be willing to start with breakfast,” Klinger said. “Then lunch.”

“Okay,” Marci said. “We’ll start with your place across from the hospital.” Marci watched Klinger as he closed his eyes, his hand still covering that part of his stomach. When he made no response she told the driver, “Pine and Hyde.”

The cabbie watched his mirror. “You want I should wait again?”

Her thoughts clearly elsewhere, Marci shook her head vaguely.

“All good things must come to an end,” the driver said. He pulled the machine into gear and studied its side-view mirror. When it became safe to merge into traffic he did so, asking the while, “Did anybody in this vehicle ever wonder how many Hummers it would take to equal the density of the neutron star that’s at the heart of the Crab Nebula? No? Well, take heart. A Chinese–Iranian consortium has given considerable thought to the problem …”

With a generous tip, the cab fare added up to one hundred and sixty dollars. Once seated in the diner, Marci dutifully filled out all three of the business-card size receipts in order to reflect a total of twice that.

“Right off the top,” she said to Klinger, as she filed the swatches of yellow pasteboard in the wallet compartment with the thrift-shop and other receipts.

They were in the same booth he and Frankie had occupied … had that been just yesterday? Klinger relaxed his aching frame against the cushions. “This grand you mentioned. Is that tax deductible, too?”

“One-time day labor subcontract,” Marci replied without hesitation. “Absolutely deductible.” She smiled sweetly. “I’ll need your address and Social Security number.”

Klinger’s gut really was bothering him this morning. He closed his eyes a little too tightly. “Why’s that?”

“So I can 1099 you.”

A minute passed. “What kind of beef is that?”

Marci looked puzzled. “Beef?”

The waitress brought coffee. Klinger opened his eyes. It was the same waitress, too. She made no sign that she recognized him. Clothes make the man. Klinger watched her walk away. Had that really been just yesterday?

“Are you serious about that grand?” he asked abruptly.

Marci nodded.

“Okay.” Klinger stood up. “I’ll be right back.” He walked out the front door, looked both ways, took a right and disappeared.

Marci watched him go. After a moment she shrugged, took out her phone, and applied her thumbs to it.

Upon his return Klinger sat back into the booth, made a couple of moves beneath the edge of the table, topped off his coffee from a half-pint of whiskey in a paper sack, recapped it, and dropped the package into the inside breast pocket of his new-to-him tweed jacket.

Marci raised a dubious eyebrow. “That ought to fix the hole in your stomach.”

Klinger lifted the mug to his lips and sipped. “One man’s ambrosia is another man’s hotshot,” he took a second sip, “is the primary tenet of Pragmatism.” He drained half the cup and set it down again.

Marci, texting, nodded as if she’d understood every word.

The waitress appeared bearing sausage, eggs, grits, toast, butter, and jam, all for Klinger, and a cup of black tea with a bowl of oatmeal and blueberries for Marci.

“I suppose it could be both,” Marci observed.

“Yeah,” Klinger said, not bothering to conceal his uninterest in her opinion.

After he’d tucked away about two-thirds of his meal, Klinger slowed down enough to ask her why and what for.

Marci retrieved Phillip’s phone from her purse and set it on the table. “Without a password, this phone is useless.”

“The new battery isn’t enough, huh?”

“The battery isn’t enough.”

Klinger caught the waitress’s eye by raising his coffee cup. “And with a password?”

“Hard to say,” Marci admitted. “But it’s something we need to find out.”

The waitress appeared with a pot of coffee. “Leave plenty of room for cream,” Klinger requested. “So you can’t just ask your buddy for the password?”

“He won’t give it to me,” Marci said. “But he might give it to you.”

Klinger, about to redouble the dose of whiskey, thought better of it, capped the bottle, and handed it over the table-top. “Would you mind putting this in your purse?”

Marci looked at the paper sack, then at Klinger.

Klinger waited.

She took the bottle and put it in her purse.

Klinger set about pursuing the balance of his meal. “So it’s a con.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“If the idea is for me to go into this guy’s hospital room and con the password out of him—yes, I’d call it a con.”

“I’m thinking that’s the only way it’s going to work,” Marci confided.

Klinger crosscut a length of sausage and speared it with his fork. “Why shouldn’t he give it up to you? He knows you, right? You’re friends?”

Marci drew a little circle on the Formica with the tip of her forefinger. “Phillip,” she sighed.

While Klinger waited, chewing, he idly wondered if her answer was going to be a lie because it needed to be a lie, or because she liked lying.

“Okay, okay,” she said, as she self-consciously watched the forefinger. “Phillip knows that I know that he has another girlfriend, and he thinks that, while I have a pretty good idea, I’m not really positive who she is.” She looked out the window next to them. “I mean, I can’t prove who she is.” She sighed, then looked at Klinger. “But if she’s who I think she is, things are going to go very badly for Phillip and, not so incidentally, for me and for the company that Phillip and I both work for.”

Klinger forked what was left of his grits into his mouth and laid his utensil across the empty plate. “Wait a minute.” He dabbed his lips with his napkin. “You and this guy Phillip are an item? Phillip is your intended? Your fiancé? The guy for whom you’d like to gain some … experience?”

By way of an answer, she retrieved her own phone from her purse, swiped it five or six times, considered the result, swiped some more, then turned the screen so Klinger could see it.

“Wow,” Klinger said after a moment. “She’s almost as pretty as you are.”

Marci blushed a deep crimson. “That’s not a very good picture,” she said. “She’s a lot prettier than that.”

“Does she always wear so little clothing?”

“It’s a vacation photo,” Marci said defensively. “She was in Hawaii.”

“And might I ask how it came into your possession?”

Marci bit her lower lip.

“On the one hand, you don’t have to tell me. On the other hand, I’m sure I’d never be able to guess, even if I wanted to.” Klinger pointed at the screen. “On the third hand, do I need to know?”

Marci made the picture go away and placed the phone, screen down, on the table top. “One day at the office he went to lunch and left his e-mail open on his computer,” she said simply. “I’m not proud of it.” She tapped the phone with a fingernail. “But she’s not after Phillip for his body.” Her mouth tightened. “Or his mind, or his heart.”

Klinger lifted his hands. “What else is there?”

Marci raised her eyes and looked at Klinger. “Computer programming.”

“I might have known.” Klinger shook his head. “Of course.” He nodded. “How stupid of me.”

“Work that Phillip has done,” Marci continued in all seriousness. “And work that only he knows how to do. He’s one of the best.”

An image of Frankie Geeze flitted across Klinger’s mind. Frankie Geeze had been a man whose work was unique and irreplaceable. Frankie Geeze had been one of the best.

The best weren’t faring too well, of late.

“So this babe.” Klinger pointed at the phone. “She’s like a spy?”

Marci lowered her voice. “She’s a double agent.”

By now Klinger no longer believed a word Marci was saying.

“So she’s like schtupping your buddy Phillip in the hope that he’ll blurt a trade secret at the moment of ecstasy?”

“About five thousand lines of code,” Marci said. “That’s almost exactly it. A module of code, what they call an object. Anybody who writes an app—?”

“Oh, an app,” Klinger shook his head.

Marci brightened. “You know from apps?”

Klinger held up a hand, its palm toward Marci, and definitely shook his head.

“Well,” Marci said, “if you did? Phillip’s object would make your life a lot easier.”

“What’s this chick’s name?”

The merest quiver passed over Marci’s lower lip. “Taffy Quesada.”

Klinger frowned. “Outside of
chiva
,
adiós
, and
hombre de negocios
, I don’t speak much Spanish,” he said. “But is Taffy the feminine form?”

Marci took her turn at frowning. “What is
chiva
?”

“Heroin,” Klinger told her simply.

Marci’s mouth formed the word
oh
, but did not articulate it aloud. “Taffy,” she said after a moment, “is—how shall I put it—is a very feminine form.”

“I see. So is what this Taffy person doing illegal?”

“Yes.” Marci shook her head glumly. “But if Phillip lets her get away with it, and by the time any resulting litigation could kick in?” She shook her head. “The industry will have moved on in the meantime and the question of legality will pretty much be moot.”

Klinger’s eyes hardened. “Like I got any fucking idea what you’re talking about.”

Marci nodded. She scratched the back of her phone with a fingernail, and she watched her fingernail as she did it. As the back of her phone was covered with scratches that ran parallel to the new ones, Klinger realized that this must be a habit of hers.

“Sometimes,” she said, as if directing her reflections to
the back of her cellphone, “I think I’d be better off being more like you.”

“Oh?” said Klinger. “And how’s that?”

Marci shrugged. “A drunk who lives in a hotel when he has the money, and who knows absolutely nothing about cellphones, or intellectual property rights, or deception, betrayal, corporate espionage …” She looked up and flashed a sad smile. “Or women.”

Klinger regarded her as if from a long distance and a long time away. If space, i.e. context, really told matter how to move, Klinger would have been long gone from the corner of Hyde and Pine. “I know everything I need to know about women,” he finally said. “And nothing about computers.”

Marci went from scratching the back of her cellphone to tapping it. “Doesn’t make any difference,” she said. She lifted her eyes. “You can always use a thousand bucks.”